A faux ruckus raised over a recent reorganization of Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority illustrates just how uninformed – aided naturally enough by oversimplistic if not mendacious publicity by special interests and subsequent stenography by news organizations – is the public about climate change and how it relates to the state’s management of coastal lands.
Last month, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed into law HB 806, which alters membership on the CPRA Board (note that the CPRA is divided into a policy-making arm, the Board, and an implementation arm, called the Authority which typically is denoted by the acronym). It removed six of the 23 and added three more.
This may be the first step in Landry’s planned overhaul of the CPRA as a whole. A transition committee of his recommended integrating it with the Department of Energy and Natural Resources. A bill to do that stalled in the past legislative session, perhaps over the perception that this attempt to make coherent a patchwork of quasi-independent entities that make coordination of conservation policy difficult instead somehow would deemphasize that function, if not degrade it.
The exaggerated reaction to the Board rejiggering suggests this also misperceives, whether encouraged by the political left and its allies. Prior to the alteration, the governor appointed eight (to top-level executive positions within his administration) with Senate confirmation and another eight he appointed with confirmation from nominations submitted by coastal area levee districts, legislators, and parish governing authorities.
Afterwards, with the removal of four of his officer appointees but adding three at-large appointees to his purview, he appoints one fewer not mediated out of 20. Removing the elected commissioners of insurance and agriculture and forestry, whose positions have little to do with coastal land management, plus some of his appointees does little to change the influence the governor could have over the Board. He still appoints a supermajority, 75 percent rather than 70 percent of Board members, and his executive assistant for coastal activities continues as its chairman.
Yet this prompted a call to arms from the eco-left. Rebecca Triche, executive director of the Louisiana Wildlife Federation, part of the National Wildlife Federation that over the years has steadily moved away from conservation advocacy to becoming a left-leaning pressure group focused on global warming advocacy and promoting left-wing social causes, apoplectically warned “independent voices are being removed” even as only the two extremely peripheral members had been. Triche, who in the last statewide election donated to several left-wing candidates and previously to Democrat former Gov. John Bel Edwards, along with around 200 others, whether they truly understand the issues involved, collected by a special interest group signed a letter bemoaning that the board changes and overall consolidation effort allegedly threatening the integrity of the “science-based Coastal Master Plan process.”
What a howler. Master Plans historically have been infused thoroughly with politics and bad science including the most recent 2023 version, incorporating a wildly-unsupported view of climate change underpinned by faith in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming that distorts the project and policy choices made in it. This could lead to billions of taxpayer dollars being wasted on peripheral and non-essential projects based upon faulty predictions of eustatic sea level rise.
It's uncertain whether Landry’s proposed shuffling would improve the Master Plan process by its depoliticization and the Board changes likely will have little overall impact on decision-making. But, clearly given the compromised history of the plans, it’s not going to make matters worse and the possibility it could depoliticize the CPRA’s product makes its pursuit worthwhile.
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